Our CEO and Co-Founder, Antti Hämmäinen, wrote down some notes on the first year of Synergi, how the energy landscape has evolved, and what’s coming for us in 2024. And because this is the part everyone reads first, we want to thank everyone who has supported Synergi this year – investors, network, family & friends, and especially all our users! Thank you for all your feedback and trust in Synergi. We can’t wait to continue developing our smart electricity app to bring you more insights on your consumption and savings!
But first, our year in review:
Establishing a strong foothold in our home-market: Finland
2023 for Synergi started with our team of three founders, Antti, Harri & Petrus, moving to our new office and welcoming our first employee, Oliver, who joined as a software engineer. Together, we started building the company, product, and operations, and we welcomed two new employees shortly after: Kim (Marketing & Comms) and Bob (Software Engineer).
With this nimble pack of six, we launched in May the first feature in our smart electricity app: Smart Charging – a feature to help EV drivers leverage the cheap electricity hours of the day to charge at home.
Shortly after, we started to develop our Smart Solar feature, a feature that we started to design so that people with solar panels would make the most of their solar production at all times. We launched it initially in June as a solar monitoring tool. And, soon after, in August, we launched Solar Charging – a feature that enables solar panel and EV owners to use their own solar power to charge their vehicles. This results in cost-free and zero-carbon EV charging, and users can also save around 200€ per year in taxes and transmission fees.
Launching Smart Solar in its entirety, gave us some excellent visibility, for example in Iltalehti, one of the most prominent newspapers in Finland! It’s a feature our users love, and we can’t wait for the sun to start shining again in the Nordics so that all of our users can once again make the most out of their own solar production.
Growing the team and conquering new device verticals
During the summer and early fall, we welcomed two new team members, Ben (Software Engineer) and Lily (Product Designer). With their help, we started eyeing our following milestones. We had big plans to launch an optmization feature for heating and cooling devices based on real-time electricity prices and making our application even more beautiful and user-friendly.
Heat pumps have been around in the Nordics for over 20 years, so they were the logical next step. In Finland alone, there are about 1.5 million heat pumps; in essence, none have any smartness.
It was time to change this.
We started developing our Smart Climate feature to bring the smartness layer to heating and cooling devices and bring an immediate relief over the constantly changing electricity prices.
Our Smart Climate feature was launched on 01.12. at Slush (a leading tech event), where our CEO and co-founder Antti had the opportunity to present in detail what we are building at Synergi. Watch the video of our presentation here.
Buckling up for a promising year
Towards the end of the year, we had the opportunity to bring two more amazing people to the team, Ville (Business analyst) and Henrik (Software Engineer).
By now, our Smart Climate feature has been an immediate success, and in the first hours of it going live we onboarded hundreds of heat pumps to our platform.
We also launched a beta version of our mobile app to ensure that our users will have the best user experience in managing their own energy matters. The mobile app will be the facilitator of our upcoming B2B utility company partnerships. We expect the first co-branded versions of our smart electricity app to go live during the first half of 2024, so stay tuned!
Wrapping it up, I can’t wait for what next year will bring upon us and how we can continue to improve how households worldwide use electricity. What we are building is novel as we partner with utilities in Finland and beyond to bring smarter electricity management to every home. Our product will continue to move forward in leaps, and we’ll be adding new features to help every household benefit from our services.
Thank you all and see you next year!
Antti Hämmäinen
